Social Anxiety and the God Who Held Mary

Our van turned into the dirt parking lot of our church. The steeple towered above us as we settled into a parking space between two other vehicles. All the while, my stomach wrenched inside me and threatened to vomit my breakfast onto the floor. Tremors shook me. I gripped the armrests and closed my eyes.

“I can’t do this,” I cried. 

My husband reached over and held my hand. “We can go home. It’s up to you.” My heart raced in my chest as I looked up at the people trickling in through the open glass doors of our church. More tears tumbled from my cheeks onto my jeans. 

In that moment, my theology warred against my angst: My love for the local church versus my social anxiety. 

Over the years, I’ve struggled through intense bouts of social anxiety. These seasons seem to attack me out of nowhere; months will go by where it takes every bit of willpower I possess to leave the house or have guests come to ours. What makes these seasons so hard is looking back and knowing how easy it used to be to leave the house and having no idea when or if that normalcy will ever return.

God must have rows of my bottled tears by now—tears that I shed over my anxiety where I begged him to take it all away. Yet the anxiety remains. I don’t understand why, and in those moments of looking at my life and wondering why God’s hand has not lifted the anxiety from me, doubt has snaked around my heart. Where is God’s love? Why has he abandoned me? Hyperventilating in the van, gagging in the bathroom, pacing in the basement, sobbing in my bedroom—each time I begged God for relief, and he said no. Each time I fought and pressed on, trying to keep myself from drowning in the whirlpool of anxiety.

That day in the van, I didn’t have any fight left in me. As the anxiety swirled in my body and mind, I felt as though I was caught in the bathtub drain, and I didn’t have the breath or strength to keep swimming against its currents. 

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